Justin McGuirk in the August issue of Icon magazine describes experiencing Richard Serra’s permanent exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao, ‘A Matter of Time,’ and it makes me think of what it was like in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum in Copenhagen.
The walls of 14-foot-high, 2-inch-thick steel meander and spiral, they lean one way and then the other, they lead you down dark corridors into open spaces or dead ends. As you follow their course, the walls affect you physically: a pair leaning in parallel will throw you off balance as your body tries to align itself with them; walking becomes precarious, with your eyes and inner ear deprived of comforting verticals.
McGuirk on the museum itself versus Serra’s work:
If [Frank] Gehry shows us how to do architecture as sculpture, then Serra has returned the favor by showing us sculpture as building.